For humans and satellites alike, making a living in space is hard. First, there’s the problem of surviving the brief but energetic and failure-prone ride there, after which you get to alternately roast and freeze as you zip around the planet at 20 times the speed of sound. The latter fact is made all the more dangerous by the swarm of space debris, both natural and man-made, that whizzes away up there along with you, waiting to cause an accident.

One such accident has apparently led to the early demise of a Russian weather satellite. Just a few months after launch, Meteor-M 2-2 suffered a sudden orbital anomaly (link to Russian story; English translation). Analysis of the data makes it pretty clear what happened: the satellite was struck by something, and despite some ground-controller heroics which appear to have stabilized the spacecraft, the odds are that Meteor-M 2-2 will eventually succumb to its wounds.

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